No more tent city…we finally got rooms at the Hampton inn. Sounds great. Is great. I haven’t slept in such a plush bed in quite some time. Even so…I have to choke back tears or at least a huge sigh of apprehension every time I walk in or out of it.

It is directly in front of the convention center.

There are still chairs and leftover food on tables. There is a note scrawled in red something across the glass doors pleading for rescue and help for a dog.

You can see how they’ve begun cleaning up â€“ huge dumpsters line the street in front and they are heaped with debris.

This is my new home.

Stranger than all of that is the idea that I’m in a hotel that is quite plush in the middle of downtown new Orleans and most of the rooms have the carpet ripped up and the furniture piled to the side because the windows were blown out and water was abundant. Stranger still because we have a wide shower with great pressure but we can’t drink the water and shouldn’t even brush our teeth with it…it is contaminated.

It’s like south Africa with air conditioning.

I’m thankful though…tired from working 12 hour days…but thankful for a soft safe bug-free place to rest my head.